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Let me explain something I call the ‘modelling crisis’. It is something that many modellers in one way or another encounter. By being aware we may resolve such a crisis, avoid frustration, and, hopefully, save the world from some bad modelling.

Views on modelling

I first present two views on modelling. Bear with me!

[View 1: Model = world] The first view is that models capture things in the real world pretty well and some models are pretty much representative. And of course this is true. You can add many things to the model and you may have. But if you think along this line, you start seeing the model as if it is the world. At one point you may become rather optimistic about modelling. Well, I really mean to say, you become naive: the model is fabulous. The model can help anyone with any problem only somewhat related to the original idea behind this model. You don’t waste time worrying about the details and sell the model to everyone listening, and you’re quite convinced in the way you do this. You may come to a belief that the model is the truth.

[View 2: Model ≠ world] The second view is that the model can never represent the world adequately enough to really predict what is going on. And of course this is true. But if you think along this line, you can get pretty frustrated: the model is never good enough, because factor A is not in there, mechanism B is biased, etc. At one point you may become quite pessimistic about ‘the model’: will it help anyone anytime soon? You may come to the belief that the model is nonsense (and that modelling itself is nonsense).

As a modeller, you may encounter these views in your modelling journey: in how your model is perceived, in how your model is compared to other models and in the questions you’re asked about your model. And it may the case that you get stuck in either one of the views yourself. And you may not be aware, but you might still behave accordingly.

Possible consequences

Let’s conceive the idea of having a business doing modelling: we are ambitious and successful! What might happen over time with our business and with our clients?

Your clients love your business – Clients can ask us any question and they will get a very precise answer back! Anytime we give a good result, a result that comes true in some sense, we are praised, and our reputation grows. Anytime we give a bad result, something that turns out quite different from what we’d expected, we can blame the particular circumstances which could not have been foreseen or argue that this result is basically out of the original scope. Our modesty makes our reputation grow! And it makes us proud!

Assets need protection – Over time, our model/business reputation becomes more and more important. You should ask us for any modelling job because we’ve modelled (this) for decades. Any question goes into our fabulous model that can Answer Any Question In A Minute (AAQIAM). Our models became patchworks because of questions that were not so easy to fit in. But obviously, as a whole, the model is great. More than great: it is the best! The models are our key assets: they need to be protected. In a board meeting we decide that we should not show the insides of our models anymore. We should keep them secret.

Modelling schools – Habits emerge of how our models are used, what kind of analysis we do, and which we don’t. Core assumptions that we always make with our model are accepted and forgotten. We get used to those assumptions, we won’t change them anyway and probably we can’t. It is not really needed to think about the consequences of those assumptions anyway. We stick to the basics, represent the results in the way that the client can use it, and mention in footnotes how much detail is underneath, and that some caution is warranted in interpretation of the results. Other modelling schools may also emerge, but they really can’t deliver the precision/breadth of what we have been doing for decades, so they are not relevant, not really, anyway.

Distrusting all models – Another kind of people, typically not your clients, start distrusting the modelling business completely. They get upset in discussions: why worry about discussing the model details: there is always something missing anyway. And it is impossible to quantify anything, really. They decide that it is better to ignore model geeks completely and just follow their own reasoning. It doesn’t matter that this reasoning can’t be backed up with facts (such as a modelled reality). They don’t believe that it be done could anyway. So the problem is not their reasoning, it is the inability of quantitative science.

Here is the crisis

At this point, people stop debating the crucial elements in our models and the ambition for model innovation goes out of the window. I would say, we end up in a modelling crisis. At some point, decisions have to be made in the real world, and they can either be inspired by good modelling, by bad modelling, or not by modelling at all.

The way out of the modelling crisis

How can such a modelling crisis be resolved? First, we need to accept that the model ≠ world, so we don’t necessarily need to predict. We also need to accept that modelling can certainly be useful, for example when it helps to find clear and explicit reasoning/underpinning of an argument.

We should focus more on the problem that we really want to address, and for that problem, argue how modelling can actually contribute to a solution for that problem. This should result in better modelling questions, because modelling is a means, not an end. We should stop trying to outsource the thinking to a model.

Following from this point, we should be very explicit about the modelling purpose: in what way does the modelling contribute to solving the problem identified earlier? We have to be aware that different kinds of purposes lead to different styles of reasoning, and, consequently, to different strengths and weaknesses in the modelling that we do. Consider the differences between prediction, explanation, theoretical exposition, description and illustration as types of modelling purpose, see (Edmonds 2017), (more types are possible).

Following this point, we should accept the importance of creativity and the process in modelling. Science is about reasoned, reproducible work. But, paradoxically, good science does not come from a linear, step-by-step approach. Accepting this, modelling can help both in the creative process by exploring possible ideas, explicating an intuition as well as in justification and underpinning of a very particular reasoning. Next, it is important avoid mixing these perspectives up. The modelling process is as relevant as the model outcome. In the end, the reasoning should be standalone and strong (also without the model). But you may have needed the model to find it.

We should adhere to better modelling practices and develop the tooling to accommodate them. For ABM, many successful developments are ongoing: we should be explicit and transparent about assumptions we are making (e.g. the ODD protocol, Polhill et al. 2008). We should develop requirements and procedures for modelling studies, with respect to how the analysis is performed, also if clients don’t ask for it (validity, robustness of findings, sensitivity of outcomes, analysis of uncertainties). For some sectors, such requirements have been developed. The discussion around practices and validation is prominent in ABMs, where some ‘issues’ may be considered obvious (see for instance Heath, Hill, and Ciarallo 2009, the effort through CoMSES), but they should be asked for any type of model. In fact, we should share, debate on, and work with all types of models that are already out there (again, such as the great efforts through CoMSES), and consider forms of multi-modelling to save time and effort and benefit from strengths of different model formalisms.

We should start looking for good examples: get inspired and share them. Personally I like Basic Traffic from the NetLogo library, it does not predict you where traffic jams are, but it clearly shows the worth of slowing down earlier. Another may be the Limits to Growth, irrespective of its predictive power.

We should start doing it better ourselves, so that we show others that it can be done!

If one adds in some extra detail to a general model it can become more specific — that is it then only applies to those cases where that particular detail held. However the reverse is not true: simplifying a model will not make it more general – it is just you can imagine it would be more general.

To see why this is, consider an accurate linear equation, then eliminate the variable leaving just a constant. The equation is now simpler, but now will only be true at only one point (and only be approximately right in a small region around that point) – it is much less general than the original, because it is true for far fewer cases.

This is not very surprising – a claim that a model has general validity is a very strong claim – it is unlikely to be achieved by arm-chair reflection or by merely leaving out most of the observed processes.

Only under some special conditions does simplification result in greater generality:

When what is simplified away is essentially irrelevant to the outcomes of interest (e.g. when there is some averaging process over a lot of random deviations)

When what is simplified away happens to be constant for all the situations considered (e.g. gravity is always 9.8m/s^2 downwards)

When you loosen your criteria for being approximately right hugely as you simplify (e.g. mover from a requirement that results match some concrete data to using the model as a vague analogy for what is happening)

In other cases, where you compare like with like (i.e. you don’t move the goalposts such as in (3) above) then it only works if you happen to know what can be safely simplified away.

Why people think that simplification might lead to generality is somewhat of a mystery. Maybe they assume that the universe has to obey ultimately laws so that simplification is the right direction (but of course, even if this were true, we would not know which way to safely simplify). Maybe they are really thinking about the other direction, slowly becoming more accurate by making the model mirror the target more. Maybe this is just a justification for laziness, an excuse for avoiding messy complicated models. Maybe they just associate simple models with physics. Maybe they just hope their simple model is more general.

A policy maker has a new idea and wishes to know what might be the effect of implementing the associated policy or regulation. They ask an agent-based modeller for help. The modeller replies that the situation looks interesting. They will start a project to develop a new model from scratch and it will take three years. The policy maker replies they want the results tomorrow afternoon. On being informed that this is not possible (or that the model will of necessity be bad) the policy maker looks elsewhere.

Clearly this will not do. Yet it seems, at present that every new problem leads to the development of a new “hero” ABM developed from the ground up. I would like to argue that for practical policy problems we need a different approach., one in which persistent models are developed that outlast the life of individual research projects, and are continuously developed, updated and challenged against the kinds of multiple data streams that are now becoming available in the social realm.

By way of comparison consider the case of global weather and climate models. These are large models developed over many years. They are typically hundreds of thousands of lines of code, and are difficult for any single individual to fully comprehend. Their history goes back to the early 20th century, when Richardson made the first numerical weather forecast for Europe, doing all the calculations by hand. Despite the forecast being incorrect (a better understanding of how to set up initial conditions was needed) he was not deterred: His vision of future forecasts involved a large room full of “computers” (i.e. people) each calculating the numerics for their part of the globe and pooling the results to enable forecasting in real time (Richardson 1922). With the advent of digital computing in the 1950s these models began to be developed systematically, and their skill at representing the weather and climate has undergone continuous improvement (see e.g. Lynch 2006). At the present time there are perhaps a few tens of such models that operate globally, with various strengths and weaknesses,. Their development is very far from complete: The systems they represent are complex, and the models very complicated, but they gain their effectiveness through being run continually, tested and re-tested against data,, with new components being repeatedly improved and developed by multiple teams over the last 50 years. They are not simple to set up and run, but they persist over time and remain close to the state-of-the –art and to the research community.

I suggest that we need something like this in agent-based modelling. A suite of communally developed models that are not abstract, but that represent substantial real systems, such as large cities, countries or regions,; that are persistent and continually developed, on a code base that is largely stable; and more importantly undergo continual testing and validation. At the moment this last part of the loop is not typically closed: models are developed and scenarios proposed, but the model is not then updated in the light of new evidence, and then re-used and extended: the PhD has finished, or the project ended, and the next new problem leads to a new model. Persistent models, being repeatedly run by many, would gradually have bugs and inconsistencies discovered and corrected(although new ones would also inevitably be introduced), could be very complicated because continually tested, and continually available for interpretation and development of understanding, and become steadily better documented. Accumulated sets of results would show their strengths and weaknesses for particular kinds of issues, and where more work was most urgently needed.

In this way when, say ,the mayor London wanted to know the effect of a given policy, a set of state-of the-art models of London would already exist which could be used to test out the policy given the best available current knowledge. The city model would be embedded in a lager model or models of the UK, or even the EU, so as to be sure that boundary conditions would not be a problem, and to see what the wider unanticipated consequences might be. The output from such models might be very uncertain: “forecasts” (saying what will happen, as opposed to what kind of things might happen) would not be the goal, but the history of repeated testing and output would demonstrate what level of confidence was warranted in the types of behaviour displayed by the results: preferably this would at least be better than random guesswork. Nor would such a set of models rule out or substitute for other kinds of model: idealised, theoretical, abstract and applied case studies would still be needed to develop understanding and new ideas.

The kind of development of models for policy is already taking place in to an extent (see e.g. Waldrop 2018), but is currently very limited. However, in the face of current urgent and pressing problems, such as climate change, eco-system destruction, global financial insecurity, continuing widespread poverty and failure to approach sustainable development goals in any meaningful way, the ad-hoc make-a-new-model every time approach is inadequate. To build confidence in ABM as a tool that can be relied on for real world policy we need persistent virtual worlds.

Since this is new venture, we need to establish conventions. Since JASSS has been running since 1998 (twenty years!) it is reasonable to argue that something un-cited in JASSS throughout that period has effectively been forgotten by the ABM community. This contribution by Grémy is actually a single chapter in a book otherwise by Boudon (a bibliographical oddity that may have contributed to its neglect. Grémy also appears to have published mostly in French, which may also have had an effect. An English summary of his contribution to simulation might be another useful item for RofASSS.) Boudon gets 6 hits on the JASSS search engine (as of 31.05.18), none of which mention simulation and Gremy gets no hits (as does Grémy: unfortunately it is hard to tell how online search engines “cope with” accents and thus whether this is a “real” result).

Since this book is still readily available as a mass-market paperback, I will not reprise the argument of the simulation here (and its limitations relative to existing ABM methodology could be a future RofASSS contribution). Nonetheless, even approximately empirical modelling in the mid-seventies is worthy of note and the article is early to say other important things (for example about simulation being able to avoid “technical assumptions” – made for solubility rather than realism).

The point of this contribution is to draw attention to an argument that I have only heard twice (and only found once in print) namely that we should look at the form of real data as an initial justification for using ABM at all (please correct me if there are earlier or better examples). Grémy (1974, p. 210) makes the point that initial incongruities between the attitudes that people hold (altruistic versus selfish) and their career choices (counsellor versus corporate raider) can be resolved in either direction as time passes (he knows this because Boudon analysed some data collected by Rosenberg at two points from US university students) as well as remaining unresolved and, as such, cannot readily be explained by some sort of “statistical trend” (that people become more selfish as they get older or more altruistic as they become more educated). He thus hypothesises (reasonably it seems to me) that the data requires a model of some sort of dynamic interaction process that Grémy then simulates, paying some attention to their survey results both in constraining the model and analysing its behaviour.

This seems to me an important methodological practice to rescue from neglect. (It is widely recognised anecdotally that people tend to use the research methods they know and like rather than the ones that are suitable.) Elsewhere (Chattoe-Brown 2014), inspired by this argument, I have shown how even casually accessed attitude change data really looks nothing like the output of the (very popular) Zaller-Deffuant model of opinion change (very roughly, 228 hits in JASSS for Deffuant, 8 for Zaller and 9 for Zaller-Deffuant though hyphens sometimes produce unreliable results for online search engines too.) The attitude of the ABM community to data seems to be rather uncomfortable. Perhaps support in theory and neglect in practice would sum it up (Angus and Hassani-Mahmooei 2015, Table 5 in section 4.5). But if our models can’t even “pass first base” with existing real data (let alone be calibrated and validated) should we be too surprised if what seems plausible to us does not seem plausible to social scientists in substantive domains (and thus diminishes their interest in ABM as a “real method?”) Even if others in the ABM community disagree with my emphasis on data (and I know that they do) I think this is a matter that should be properly debated rather than just left floating about in coffee rooms (as such this is what we intend RofASSS to facilitate). As W. C. Fields is reputed to have said (though actually the phrase appears to have been common currency), we would wish to avoid ABM being just “Another good story ruined by an eyewitness”.